With the advance of mobile communication technologies and devices, voice and data communications can be conducted anytime anywhere. Recent mobile terminals are evolving to multimedia communication terminals with various supplementary functions such as messaging service, audio and video playback, and game functions.
Among them, the messaging service (i.e. short message service (SMS)) has grown rapidly in popularity in addition to the fundamental voice communication. SMS allows the interchange of short text messages between mobile terminals. Recently, the messaging service has developed in the form Enhanced Messaging Service (EMS) and Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) which enables carrying various types of data such as audio including voice and still and motion pictures.
In the case of a multimedia message that is structured in a Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language (SMIL) format, the multimedia message can be saved, played, and viewed after downloading the entire pages constituting the multimedia message. However, receiving a multimedia message longer than a few Kilo-bytes may incur a charge for a few dozen seconds for downloading the multimedia message. Also, in order to support MMS service, the mobile terminal is required to secure enough storage space.